This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
Maya Angelou, born Marguerite Annie Johnson
People whose history and future were threatened each day by extinction considered that it was only by divine intervention that they were able to live at all. I find it interesting that the meanest life, the poorest existence, is attributed to God’s will, but as human beings become more affluent, as their living standard and style begin to ascend the material scale, God descends the scale of responsibility at a commensurate speed.
Day | Existence | Future | God | History | Life | Life | People | Responsibility | Style | Will | God |
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
In the lives of many people it is possible to find a unifying purpose that justifies the things they do day in, day out – a goal that like a magnetic field attracts their psychic energy, a goal upon which all lesser goals depend… Without such a purpose, even the best-ordered consciousness lacks meaning.
Consciousness | Day | Energy | Goals | Meaning | People | Purpose | Purpose |
Norman Mailer, fully Norman Kingsley Mailer
Each day a few more lies eat into the seed which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.
Day | Little | Television |
Nicholas of Cusa, also Nicholas of Kues and Nicolaus Cusanus NULL
Humanity will one day find that it is not a diversity of creeds but the very same creed which is everywhere proposed. There can not be but one wisdom. Humans must therefore all agree that there is but one most imple wisdom whose power is infinite. And everyone in explaining the intensity of this beauty must discover that it is a supreme and terrible beauty.
Beauty | Creed | Day | Diversity | Humanity | Power | Will | Wisdom | Beauty |
Paramahansa Yogananda, born Mukunda Lal Ghosh
The ordinary person is influenced by his worldly environment. The man of concentration shapes his own life. He plans his day and finds at the end of the day that his plans are carried out; he finds himself nearer to God and his goal. A weak man plans many wonderful things, but finds at the end of the day that he has been a victim of circumstances and bad habits. Such a person usually blames everyone but himself.
Circumstances | Day | God | Life | Life | Man | God | Victim |
Ovid, formally Publius Ovidius Naso NULL
Like fragile ice anger passes away in time.
Oscar Wilde, pen name for Fingal O'Flahertie Wills
I took pleasure where it pleased me, and passed on. I forgot that every little action of the common day makes or unmakes character… I allowed pleasure to dominate me. I ended in horrible disgrace.
Those wretches who never have experienced the sweets of wisdom and virtue, but spend all their time in revels and debauches, sink downward day after day, and make their whole life one continued series of errors. They taste no real or substantial pleasure; but, resembling so many brutes, with eyes always fixed on the earth, and intent upon their loaden tables, they pamper themselves in luxury and excess.
Day | Earth | Excess | Life | Life | Luxury | Pleasure | Taste | Time | Virtue | Virtue | Wisdom |
Shallow men believe in luck, believe in circumstances: it was somebody’s name, or he happened to be there at the time, or it was so then, and another day it would have been otherwise. Strong men believe in cause and effect. The man was born to do it, and his father was born to be the father of him and for this deed, and, by looking narrowly, you shall see there was no luck in the matter, but it was all a problem in arithmetic, or an experiment in chemistry.
Cause | Circumstances | Day | Experiment | Father | Luck | Man | Men | Time | Luck |
R. G. Collingwood, fully Robert George Collingwood
There is no truer and more abiding happiness than the knowledge that one is free to go on doing, day by day, the best work one can do, in the kind one likes best, and that this work is absorbed by a steady market and thus supports one's own life. Perfect freedom is reserved for the man who lives by his own work and in that work does what he wants to do.
Day | Freedom | Knowledge | Life | Life | Man | Wants | Work | Happiness |
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.
Finish every day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you will begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered by your old nonsense.
Rainer Maria Rilke, full name René Karl Wilhelm Johann Josef Maria Rilke
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live your questions now, and perhaps even without knowing it, you will live along some distant day into your answers.